Paul Harding - Tinkers

I have so much to say about this book, yet I must admit that my appreciation of it started off oh-so-slowly. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - not my favourite prize. I know it sounds incredibly snooty to say this (indeed, to 'have' a favourite literary prize at all), but my favourite literary prize is the Man Booker - only because I almost always love the books that win it. I equate the Pulitzer, for some reason, with dry, lofty writing - although I have just looked up a list of past winners and now see that this is completely unfounded: I love Jhumpa Lahiri and Annie Proulx and Carol Shields and Barbara Kingsolver and Geoffrey Eugenides and Junot Diaz and have heard wonderful things about Jennifer Egan, so I have no idea what I was thinking. So maybe, actually, it's because of my recent reading of Steve Hely's cynical take on literary writing that when I started reading this book it was hard for me to absorb the beauty of the language without feeling like it was all a bit too much, a bit try-hard.

Boy did that change.

Tinkers is our bookclub pick for this month, and although I will be away traveling when the Bibliofillies meet, I wanted to participate by at least reading the book, so I soldiered on.

Having reached the end, the words I now want to use to describe Harding's writing are the same words everybody else has already used - lyrical, eligiac, nostalgic. Beautiful. It did not surprise me to learn that Harding is also a musician - you can feel it in the rhythm of his language. It just took me a while to sink into the music of his writing and truly appreciate what I was hearing.

George Washington Crosby, a repairer of clocks, lies dying in the house that he built, surrounded by wife, sisters, children and grandchildren. The unusual nature of the narrative that is to follow is signified by the first line:

"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died."

The short novel that ensues is a meandering exploration of last thoughts and memories, stories layered within stories, lives overlapping lives and time folding in on itself so that one is left, finally, with indelible impressions of the transient beauty of both life and death, and of the importance of family.

Much of the core of the novel is dedicated to the story of George's father, Howard, told interchangeably in third person and first person. Howard is a peddler of wares, a salesman of oddities who wheels his wagon from town to town, through wood and vale. He is also an epileptic, in an age when this is not well understood or accepted. Certain unconnected moments in Howard's itinerant life are described in detail, and it is these that for me formed the heart of the story: his annual interactions with a silent hermit who, one year, needs his tooth pulled, and who gifts Howard before his death with a signed first edition of The Scarlet Letter, thereby confirming his onetime friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne; the time he reluctantly set out to rescue George and return him home, when George had run away in shock as a young boy after witnessing one of his father's fits; the moment his (Howard's) father, suffering from an ailment of the mind that is described as a ghostly fading away of himself (Altzheimer's?), is removed forever from the family by men clad in black, and which Howard, as a boy, responds to by running into the woods attempting to find the teeth of his father hidden in an ear of corn, the hair of his father in the foliage, eventually sinking into a silt-filled pond and sitting like this, with only his head above water, for a whole night, during which he believes he sees the native American Old Sabbatis sitting similarly submerged, a still head floating on the water across from him, still save for the moment when a whole trout jumps out of the water and into the open mouth of Old Sabbatis. The tales are interwoven like squares on a patchwork quilt, and some take on the nature of fable, so one is not sure, for example, about the veracity of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story, until George, 24 hours from his death, remembers he must tell his family about the signed first edition hidden in a safety deposit box.

I warmed to Howard and, through him, to George, and the reason this book resonated for me, and will continue to resonate long after the reading of it, is that this portrayal of death is as uplifting, somehow, as it is real. I cried when I finished the last page, but not from sadness, and it is hard to explain exactly why or what made me cry. There is a warmth and a relief, I suppose, in the knowledge that life continues in this winding fashion, that through us other lives continue, that through others, our lives will continue, and that the significance of a son to his father and a father to his son is not diminished by age or distance or by death.

At the end of his life George becomes aware of a person in the room with him, when he wakes (or believes he wakes) in the middle of the night. The person is familiar but he cannot identify whether the person is male or female, friend or family. The person, I believe is us, or God, or maybe the point is that God - what we think of as God - is in us, because:

"...the person radiated a sense of possessing hundreds of years, but as a simultaneity: The person contained hundreds of years, but they overlapped, as if the person experienced any number of times at once."

The person says:

"I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you."

It is, to me, as though we are physically represented in the story, here - that we are that person, at George's bedside, that by reading this book and understanding his thoughts and the reflections of time upon time, of George and Howard and Howard's father - three generations of men in the same family - we understand that we are both our literal age but that we are also surrounded by a near century of years: not just the century of the lives George brings to us, but the century of those actually around us, and we thank George for the gift of recognition, that this is what is possible in life. We thank Harding for that gift.

A profoundly moving book.

Favourite passages:

There are too many to list, but here are a few moments to remember.

Harding's description of what it feels like to have an epileptic fit is the most memorable I have read since Dostoyevsky - it makes me wonder whether he has personal experience of epilepsy.

"There was also the ring in Howard Crosby's ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell. Cold hopped onto the tips of his toes and rode on the ripples of the ringing throughout his body until his teeth clattered and his knees faltered and he had to hug humself to keep from unraveling. This was his aura, a cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure. Howard had epilepsy."

Those readers who have difficulty with the non-linear nature of the narrative need look no further than the pages of the book itself to find an explanation for why it is written so:

"George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment."

The notion (which should be depressing but somehow isn't, here) that all of us are living on borrowed time, fading even as we live:

"So there is my son, already fading. The thought frightened him. The thought frightened him because as soon as it came to him, he knew that it was true. He understood suddenly that even though his son knelt in front of him, familiar, mundane, he was already fading away, receding. His son was fading away before his eyes and that fact was inevitable, even though Howard understood, too, that the fading was yet to begin in any actual sense, that at that moment he and his son the father standing in the dimness, the son kneeling and partly obscured by the charred door, were still only heading, not yet arrived, toward the point where the fading would begin."

Overall assessment: Five out of Five.

Notes:

• I read this as an e-book. Discussion will come, on this blog, about the merits of e-books versus hard copy and all that goes with that debate, but for now: I wish I had read this in paper form. I want a beautiful little hardback version to call my own. There were so many passages I wanted to re-visit, and many times when I wanted to flip back to an earlier section of the book. Also, my feeling generally is that e-books are wonderful for reading genre fiction, but any book of tremendous literary merit - any book requiring some concentration and effort in the reading - is enhanced by a paper format. I think I would have appreciated the language sooner had I been reading paper. And I believe there is a tendency, when reading an e-book, to speed up one's reading - I found myself needing to consciously slow down, go back, read the last sentence again but slower, to take it in properly rather than to simply move past it. Having said all of that, the automatic highlight function of the Kindle app is great, and looking at a single page to see all of one's highlighted passages at the end makes reviewing far easier. Perhaps for a book like this it is in fact worth owning both versions, electronic and paper - what a boon for the publishing industry if this was the conclusion of many readers!

• You have probably all heard this story, but it's a good one and worth repeating. Paul Harding approached many publishers for many years with his manuscript and was repeatedly rejected out of hand. Finally, after Tinkers suffered three years languishing in a desk drawer, a small publisher, the Bellevue Literary Press, agreed to publish the novel. When it was printed it made so little noise that the New York Times failed to review it. And then it won the Pulitzer. Wow. An inspiring story indeed for any aspiring / struggling writer. 

Chris Cleave - Gold

This book was written in 2011 and published in the UK in July 2012, right on time for the London Olympics. It feels as though Chris Cleave decided, in the lead-up to the Olympics, to write a book about elite athletes that would tug at the heartstrings of anyone who watched or raced or otherwise participated in any of the Olympic events (that is to say, virtually everyone in the world).

Admittedly the highs and lows of professional athletes training for the highest order of competition make for fascinating subject matter, and I can see how this would have seemed like a very good idea at the time, both commercially and as a writer.

But - the book simply doesn't work.

I am so disappointed. I absolutely loved Cleave's earlier books - Little Bee (also published as The Other Hand) in particular still gives me shivers when I think about it, but Incendiary was also extraordinary.

Could it be that Cleave is simply out of ideas? Or that there was commercial pressure on him to release another book before he was truly ready? Or has he just succumbed to the drive which characterises the writing of more typical genre authors, prioritising commercial subject matter over quality?

For me, I think the problem with Gold is this: Cleave chose to tell the story in the wrong way.

Gold falls prey to one of the common pitfalls of writing - too much exposition throughout slows the story, to the point where at times I was so bored I was reluctant to keep reading. More than reluctant - I had to force myself to keep reading. Instead of telling the story of three athletes chronologically, starting from the moment they all met as teenagers and following them from race to race and drama to drama so that we as readers are given a chance to become attached to them and absorbed in the story and eager to find out what happens next, Cleave chooses to tell almost all of this as back-story and flashbacks. The actual plot of the current story takes place over a very short period of time: it is a snapshot, really, of the qualifying race for the cycling sprint event at the London Olympics, and of the lives of the two female cyclists vying for that one qualifying spot.

Zoe and Kate are competitors and best friends. Jack, Kate's husband, is an Olympic gold medalist himself, and Sophie, the daughter of Kate and Jack, is suffering from a relapse of childhood leukaemia, complicating Kate's preparation for the biggest race of her life. The only other character in the novel is Tom, the girls' cycling coach, who has a slightly creepy affection for Zoe. Over time we gradually learn that the connections between the characters are less-straightforward than first portrayed - Zoe and Jack have themselves had various romantic dalliances, for example.

I think the story, taken as a whole, has the potential to be gripping, particularly because Cleave's descriptions of the world of cycling and the intense anxiety and adrenalin of each race are excellent. But because crucial plot points are leaked out of order in dribs and drabs throughout the book, we don't have a chance early enough in the story to develop attachments to any of the characters. And that renders the reading dull. It forces us to view the life events of the characters objectively, instead of allowing us to get swept up in them. Even the moment of Sophie's leukaemia diagnosis lacks emotional impact - both because we have known about it since the beginning of the book, and because Cleave returns immediately to describing the present lives of the characters, which removes any opportunity for us as readers to dwell on the diagnosis, or to feel anything about it. This technique is used so consistently throughout the book that I can't help but think the objective reading that is thrust upon us was deliberate - that maybe he wants us to view these athletes impartially, and as fixed in the current moment, so that when we actually watch the Olympics, having read the book, we will see each athlete as a whole person who may well have this kind of backstory. In other words, the point is not that we develop an attachment to these characters in particular, but rather that we become more emotionally connected to the Olympics as a whole.

Whether or not this was his desired outcome, for me the tactic failed - at least in terms of my enjoyment of the book itself. Because there was insufficient forward movement I groaned inwardly each time we were subjected to yet another flashback of childhood experience or teenage drama. I wanted something to happen, already! Let them race, for heaven's sakes!

By the end, when the backstory had finally caught up with the here and now, and the characters were finally put in positions of current conflict with one another, I warmed to the story.

However, I was still removed enough to be unusually aware of and frustrated by the flaws of some of the characters. The love triangle between Kate, Jack and Zoe is reminiscent of the one in Gone with the Wind between Scarlett O'Hara, Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton-Wilkes (if we pretend Rhett doesn't exist - Tom is no Rhett Butler). Kate is as unrealistically saintly as Melanie in the face of repeated betrayals by her husband and friend. I rolled my eyes when she forgave them again and again - Jack appearing to get off without so much as a scolding. To me, her actions came across as weak and vaguely pathetic and I consequently found it hard to believe that she was an athlete capable of challenging for an Olympic gold medal. In contrast, Zoe came across as so extraordinarily selfish (especially in certain scenes at the end) that I didn't understand why Kate would have continued to consider her a friend at all, let alone a best friend. And Jack... dimwitted, fickle, indecisive Jack. What is it that makes him so irresistible to both of these women, save for the fact that he is the only man under 60 they spend any regular time with? I don't get the appeal.

Also - and I know I am on a bit of a rant - Cleave's references to sex come across like the awkward jokes made by a feeble, faintly creepy uncle. Comments about Zoe's breasts, or about Tom's peculiar feelings for her, made me cringe. This does not feel like natural territory for Cleave. For example, an early comparison of the promiscuous 'men of today' to Dyson vacuum cleaners was particularly odd:

"He didn't see how Zoe could ever find love with this new breed of men with cyclonic souls that sucked like Dysons and never needed their bag changed in order to keep on and on sucking."

In spite of these faults, had the story unfolded in a different way, I might have loved this book and forgiven the character flaws. The story itself is one with the potential to evoke tears, both out of sadness and joy. What a pity that Cleave chose a story-telling strategy which prevents either reaction.

Overall assessment: two out of five.

Pros: Cleave's writing is still, for the most part, excellent. Some passages are quite beautiful, and in particular his descriptions of the cycling races themselves are thrilling. Also, as discussed above - there is a good story buried in here. I wanted to care more about the characters. Told in a different way, this might have been a heartbreaking tale.

Cons: It doesn't work. Too much exposition. Too slow in the unfolding. Readers are treated as objective spectators.

Hermann Koch - The Dinner

This book was recommended to me by a friend (thanks Amy!) and I'm so glad I read it. But I wish I hadn't read the last few pages in darkness, at night, when the rest of the household was asleep.

In all honesty, I don't think I have ever been as disturbed by any book, save for The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan. When I finished that book I was alone, and it was night (again - glutton for punishment, I guess), and I had to hide the phyiscal book under a pile of magazines so that I was unable to even glance by accident at the cover, so visceral was the fear it provoked in me.

The Dinner starts slow. It takes place over the course of a few hours, during a dinner at a posh restaurant  attended by two brothers, Paul and Serge Lohman, and their wives, Claire and Babette. Paul, the narrator, is a retired school-teacher (well - he has been placed 'on non-active', which we eventually find out is something entirely different from voluntarily retiring) who is put off by the self-interest he perceives in his brother's political ambitions. Serge is a politician on top of his game, likely to become the next Prime Minister of The Netherlands.

As the dinner progresses from aperitif to first course to main course etc, we learn more about the characters and, importantly, about their children. Much of the story is told by Paul as back story and his narration is therefore vital to our understanding of the relationships at play. It is only midway through the book that we start to doubt the reliability of his voice.

Conversation gradually turns to the issue that is central to the book, a violent act perpetrated by the 15 year old sons of each couple, and the different ways in which each couple wants to deal with the consequences and ramifications of this act.

About the plot, it is hard to say more without revealing spoilers. Other reviewers have compared this novel to Christos Tsolkias' The Slap, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, because both similarly focus on parents dealing with the actions / reactions of their children. What becomes clear during the course of The Dinner, and what is also dealt with in both of the above-mentioned books, is that it is the parents whose actions we should be concerned about, both because they are often in and of themselves abhorrent, and because they inform the conduct and belief systems of their children.

But The Dinner is chilling on an entirely different level. Without giving too much away, I will say that there is a particular part of this book that I am trying to forget because remembering it disturbs me so profoundly it will haunt me for weeks to come. I had recommended this to my mother, when I was about two thirds of the way through, but I am now going to withdraw that recommendation - I do not wish upon her the same nightmares I am suffering.

Pros: Hermann Koch writes well and with admirable restraint, and this is a tightly drawn novel that unfolds with great subtlety. The darkness central to it emerges ever so slowly, and the disturbing realities revealed at the end are all the more powerful because they were initially so unexpected.

Cons: In the first half I felt that some of the descriptions of the restaurant and the dinner itself were deliberately drawn out in an exaggerated way, to enable the device of framing the entire novel within the various courses of a single meal. That device sometimes felt contrived. As the novel progressed, however, I became drawn in to the story sufficiently that these issues ceased to bother me. Some readers will find it difficult, I imagine, to finish the novel once it becomes clear that none of the characters are particularly likeable (some are simply morally reprehensible) - but again, for me the story itself was by that stage developed enough and absorbing enough to overcome that problem. Perhaps of deepest concern for me was the fact that - because the story is being told by a terribly unreliable narrator - some of the most pronounced injustices in the book are inadequately addressed. Given the way the story was told there was probably no way for Koch to avoid this, and I appreciate that it adds to the unsettling nature of the ending, but it also left me a bit cold.

Overall assessment: three and a half stars out of five, verging on 4. It is a brilliantly conceived book, but whilst many reviewers have bandied about the word 'chilling' in relation to this work, I would go further than that, almost classifying the ending, at least, as horror; and that is not really my bag. I still want all of you to read it though - it's one of those books that gives rise to discussion.

Steve Hely - How I Became a Famous Novelist

I picked up this satiric novel whilst browsing last week in Berkelouw books.

(On a side note, it is rare these days that I get time out to myself without a toddler in tow, so a big shout-out to Biblio-hubby for granting me that delicious hour, especially in circumstances where he was fully aware that any bookstore visit would involve a purchase or two. Or three.)

Perhaps it is because I am myself trying to get published that I was drawn to the title of this book, but I also remember hearing about it somewhere, sometime on the interweb. In any case, it looked diverting and so it was.

Steve Hely has written for 30 Rock, The Office and American Dad, three of my favourite shows, so I thought this book would have me laughing out loud. It didn't, not really. It's amusing,  but the heavy cynicism underpinning Hely's writing is quite dark, and that tempers the humour. In some ways it's a bit of a depressing read for anyone involved in the book industry or seriously interested in books.

Pete Tarslaw, the narrator of the novel, is a young apathetic college grad whose job involves writing fake college application essays for people who can't write or aren't smart enough or diligent enough to do it themselves. The only thing that gets Pete hot under the collar is his ex-girlfriend, so when she sends him an invitation to her wedding he decides he will attend, but only in order to show her up. In the meantime, with an astounding lack of knowledge or insight about the modern publishing industry, he decides he will write a book, become a bestseller, develop fame and fortune - all of which will, he presumes, allow him to land at her wedding in his own plane, splashing Krug liberally on all of the smitten guests. In order to achieve this spectacular success he analyses the New York Times bestseller list and determines what elements a book should contain in order to achieve optimum sales - for example, he soon concludes that any bestselling book must include a murder, secrets / mysterious missions, scenes on highways (to make driving seem poetic and magical), an ending evoking confusing sadness, and that the prose should be lyrical.

Armed with these 'rules', he sets off to a his aunt's house in a quiet rural location (figuring this will later go some way to proving his voice has authenticity) and, particularly improbably, writes his book within a week, albeit with the help of not-yet-FDA-approved pills provided by his researcher roommate. After a series of coincidences that play up the desperate state of modern print publishing, his book is sold. After another series of unusual coincidences, it climbs up the sales list until he is giving television interviews and rubbing shoulders with precisely the bestselling authors whose styles he aped in the first place.

Of course Pete is confronted by a number of cruel realities along the way - when his book sells, for example, he is astonished by the paltry sum of money he is offered as an advance (he had been imagining millions, book-writing being the biggest scam of the century). And ultimately, if somewhat unconvincingly, he comes to recognise that writing is more (means more) than he had thought. But overall, the impression that remains is of a spoilt, cynical young person whose sense of entitlement far outweighs any shred of integrity. If the future of books is indeed left in the hands of such a self-interested instant-gratification generation, it is no future at all.

Favourite / notable part(s):

"They're talking lawyers over here. Okay? Laywers! You might have to apologise to Oprah."

"What'd I do to her?"

"She's just - that's who you apologise to."

(love this thinly veiled reference to the James Frey scandal, which I wrote about here: http://nomadsbynecessity.blogspot.com.au/search?updated-max=2009-09-23T04:19:00-07:00&max-results=7&start=14&by-date=false)

Overall assessment (Note: I don't like having to reduce my feelings about a book to stars, but Goodreads makes me do it so I may as well carry it on here): 3 out of 5 stars.

It's well-written (the excerpts of other, fake novels contained within this one make me think Steve Hely is probably a genius writer and we should wait eagerly for any serious novels he writes in the future), and a good entertaining read, and it made me think about writing and publishing and what it all means. But I wouldn't read it again and it's not going on my 'special bookshelf'.